Machine That Changed The World The Interview with Steve Wozniak 1992 V 7CCEDE8F8CE246889EBAAB8BCB225

do you consider yourself lucky no I was gonna be designing oh yes yeah because I I don't consider myself lucky for having been designing computers because I was going to be designing computers I was gonna build that computer that year for a lot of other reasons in my life for the prior 20 years I consider myself lucky that it was a real successful and popular product and something the world wanted and it brought me a lot of I don't know wealth and fame and good things in my life consider that very very lucky and it was just at that point in time the world wanted the kind of product I was meant to build just having fun building a computer wanted to build an impressive one show it off I wanted to own it and use it also and it had to be good enough for me sure okay I usually do no so I was not designing the computer for a company I was just designing a computer to have to use for my job to play games it had to be good enough for me it had to be interesting enough that I could show it off and it didn't have to be somehow a set of definitions it has to do this much have that many memories run at that speed be able to do this kind of calculations on this type of printer didn't have to do these things okay so I was I was not designing a computer with any idea we'd ever start a company ever have a product ever be successful it was just to go down to the club and show off and to own and use I used it it worked to run some calculations for the calculator chips I was designing I'd run it right there on my desk and I was I was impressing quite a few people they would come by engineers would come by my desk after he let packer to turn me down and for doing it as a product they'd come by and say this is the most incredible product I've ever seen so they could recognize it was great but they couldn't come up with a reasoning that hewlett-packard could make it and I was uh I just had decided to satisfy myself it had to be interesting it had to be able able to show it off and so it was you know it was lucky that it was good but it was that the world wanted something that good got to repeat the question inside of Apple the hackers revolution started fading away for even my own head once I was designing these products for a company although I gone there Sam I just like to design neat products I can do that and show him off at the club I was now part of a company and we were in business and a lot of Mike Markkula was very very strong he was the businessman he said the company should be run by marketing all great companies are that marketing has to go out and sort of sense what a market wants and come back to engineering and you know work with engineering in a give-and-take sense of what can you build that would satisfy these needs of our customers he was very adamant of that and that's the sort of company Apple became because it he was in charge a hacker would have sat there and said we can do this neat thing with technology I learned this in school here's a product idea I got and there'd be a lot of randomness and not so much concern for the customer and Apple really really started changing and becoming more mature in a sense but less of less of a hackers world there were a lot of them out there and we we serviced a lot of their needs for a while but not permanently in the homebrew Computer Club the hackers legacy was pretty much computers as a tool for everyone affordable you know you don't withhold knowledge for reasons of you know of profit and whatever and it's it's hard to say how much the hackers won it kind of like the whole world of personal computers outside of the technicians outside of the hackers went so far so fast beyond them that the hacker type products were kind of lost in the mainstream of publicity and awareness if you go back and read a history the history is going to be written on what historians can find republished in newspaper articles in magazine articles and they were publishing articles about the computers that were selling in tens of thousands hundreds of thousands eventually and not the computers that were still selling just in thousands the people in the homebrew club had a specific goal would have almost been like making ourselves a structured formal entity which we like just we were just showing up because it was interesting we we did tend to share an interest in technology we liked to design we were designers we knew how to hook transistors together if there was any one goal it would have been to help personal computing help home computing come to everyone help make it affordable help make it cheap and abundant help make it good quality help make it serve people and not be a master of the people I think the I think that would be the one summary statement I'd make some people have made the play on this idea that this is mostly late was IBM was the priest how much of it was one of the one of the ideas was that IBM by being a priesthood and by going out there and having corporate clients who were rather stuffy and they would operate in a sales world that they could sell computers that didn't have the best features over computers that had more features for the same price from other companies and this was sort of an always a perception of IBM you know I don't know how accurate it is but a lot of one of our goals in the homebrew Computer Club was to overturn this sort of thing and to kind of free the world from being the subject to master companies who claim they are in charge of computer knowledge all of a sudden the world was going to discover computer knowledge is abundant and it's not so scarce it's available it's cheap even even eight-year-olds can sit down and write great programs and it used to be controlled by programmers at IBM what did the what would you want to say well at one time the the people used computers were kind of a servant of the computer you were a slave it was worth much more than you now the computer is a slave to the people the computer does our bidding the computer is a tool it's it's at our at our command it's like we have a greater sense of self esteem with the Apple to and with a few other computer ongoings in those days it used to be that computers were so important that they were more important than the people using them and we were a slave to doing things their ways now the computer does things our ways we're the master we can command it it's obedient it's friendly it's helpful it's like our self-esteem has been enhanced as computer users ok ok ok sure sure ok used to be that computers were worth more than the people using them and that we were slaves to doing things their ways now we're in control and computers do things our ways and they're obedient slaves to us and we're very happy for it and lucky and we're motivated our self-esteem is up I can do it shorter ok it used to be that the computers were so valuable and huge and important that they were worth more to a company than the people using them now the computers are obediently at our service ok ok ok in the ancient days in the older days the computer was so valuable that it was vast more important than the people using it had to be protected and I'll start over in the older days in the older days the computers were so valuable if they were worth more than the people using them and we had to obey them and do things their ways now the the computers are obedient servants to us God knows why it's like asking somebody's interested in mathematics what's so interesting about mathematics somebody was interested in cooking what's so interested about cooking you know in recipes and the like it's an easy thing it's got a lot of lot of ability it goes so far you can learn one stage of it and there's more you can learn you can take you can advance level by level it's one of those type of subjects like anything you get into seriously so you kind of can know that you're going up the level and it's interesting you're learning you're solving puzzles your mind is developing and you can appreciate it for that even before it has some value in terms of this is how I earn my living and they're kind of intriguing it's like puzzles why are puzzles interesting there are things you have to sit down figure out a clever answer and solve them and then you have this feel of feeling of worth wildness it's very motivating I accomplished something I figured out where that person where the worth at which one has to be the murderer you solve it yourself it's very personal you own it when you've done it yourself and everything about computers learning how to do them tackling a programming problem coming up with a new clever design that's different than other people might have it's one of these wide-open fields I started learning about computers in elementary school and I was heavy into just normal electronics back then this is before integrated circuits and my father somehow would passed me a book from work on programming and I couldn't understand maybe in about fourth grade didn't make any sense but by junior high school he showed me a book from back in the late 50s you know that some computers that they had designed some articles about them and I read these articles with fascination how they used oscilloscope screen that show patterns of light how they could use that to store information like memories very little information in today's terms but I read these articles and I started picking up computer concepts and I found it interesting at first and later on I started I got a book on boolean algebra and this I was good at math this was algebra I studied it and learned how to do calculations and by eighth grade built a really great science fair project I built a few computer projects even in elementary school for science fairs to show off things that could you know like I learned the concepts of how you would build a machine to play tic-tac-toe and I nearly built one on a big piece of plywood with nails pounded in and transistors that a local company gave me her child gave me 400 transistors and diodes free to build a project and I soldered all these transistors to the post and I didn't quite get it working but by eighth grade I built a working computer element an adder subtractor in binary built it out of transistors because this was before chips were affordable and it was just out of interest it wasn't like I got graded for graded on it I didn't have any friends that did it I didn't do it for because I had a group of computer people did it all alone I don't know why it was I knew when I was doing it it was like I didn't solving crossword puzzles in a sense I would dream computers and wake up with a solution in the middle of the night and I learned after a while I might forget it so I write them down and it was like that all through my childhood by at the end of high school I learned how real computers the computers from the new company digital had the PDP 8 the small computer handbook was one of the key manuals in those days that taught me a lot about computers my electronics teacher Rain strange for me to go down to a local company and program computers every Friday because we didn't have computers in high schools back then it was just a lot of a lot of factors I was always interested in always going that direction when the opportunity arose even when I got to college in 1968 there were there were probably no universities that had computers as an undergraduate curriculum and I went to the University of Colorado and I simply took a graduate course you know didn't matter I was a freshman that was my interest you know got my A+ but I also got put on probation for computer abuse because I ran too many programs did you did you get this sense I mean there weren't that many people that were into computers I knew that I was different in the sense that I would be sitting in math class in high school designing computers on page after page after page of paper and not doing the math I'd be sitting in the back designing and I knew that I couldn't show it to anyone else in the school no students no one would know would look at this picture of gates all connected up to each other and understand what the signals meant and how they flowed no one knew this kind of stuff nobody even knew that much electronics in my high school so I knew that I was kind of like special I didn't think there were gonna be jobs in computers for me I thought I was gonna be an engineer someday designing the things engineers design TVs radios you know that kind of stuff I had no idea what computers was like as a discipline you know to work someday so I didn't think I was advanced in something important I just knew that I was one of the few people that knew something that was interesting and neat actually let's just keep going understand why what what led to the cream soda computer what was I had been designing computers for my last year high school and my first year at college I got in the habit of getting manuals for all the many computers that companies were producing I would study those computers and then I got all the latest manuals from the Silicon Valley companies making better and better chips so I'd always get the latest manual and design the computers I there were several my favorite computers that I liked to design over and over and over and get my designs better and better and better meaning fewer parts and I to get local companies like Fairchild to give me some chips if you can give me this many chips I can build a computer and they kept sort of promise meaning me some rejects and nothing ever came through until it was my second year of college I believe and a local company did give me some chips signetics gave me a bunch of chips and I designed a computer of my own I thought up I'd taken classes and one of the things you do in computer classes is you what is the very smallest instruction set that can make a complete computer and I was real good at that one but solving it but I still designed a very tiny computer that had few instructions that did everything you needed to do to did a lot it was a computer and it was my own it was almost no chips almost just about 20 chips was all so I got him from signetics and a friend and I wired it up in his garage I designed it we wired it up every night for about a week in his garage and we would drink cream soda late into the night because we weren't even coke drinkers back then and as Bill Fernandez and I and got it done and working and we showed it off and a local paper even came and took some pictures of it and it was really a computer and it ran and computed oh I think bill stepped on the power supply cable of all the press was out doing a story on us and kind of smoked and that was gone 35 volts got applied dollar chips but in that day it was very very rare a couple of companies Intel and one called it was another I word in int into I forget the name but a local company gave us some memory chips eight chips that 256 bits each so I had 256 bytes on my cream-soda computer and it was solid-state memory back in 1969-70 all the memories and computers that were manufactured were core memories solid-state memories on chips cost way too much it was just impossible to conceive even 4k bytes of that kind of memory not not affordable yes as a matter of fact it was only during the Apple one design that the random memory chips went underneath they finally went under core memories magnetic core memories in price and that was starting with the 4k dynamic Ram and all the other hobby computers coming out in 1975 used static Rams that cost more than core memories and our Apple one was the first one that used the dynamics that was one of the real keys to our success well I was expecting just some enthusiasts that were interested in things like terminals and I had just designed a terminal because I did a lot of side projects and a friend of mine told me this club is for people interested in terminals and things he didn't tell me it was a microprocessor club or I would have been afraid to go because for about three years I drifted away from computers I hadn't followed microprocessors I didn't think they were gonna be worth much I was designing calculators for Hewlett Packard doing side projects with video tape recorders and building my own terminals you know just at night time but I didn't know what microprocessors were and I went to this meeting and I was kind of shocked that everybody knew about these computers were coming out at affordable prices microprocessors were here and I was scared to death that I was in the wrong place and I just thought I didn't want to let anything on I'll just sort of sit and listen and I listened a lot that night and heard a lot of interesting things and it really changed my life that reinvested in computers once I found out microprocessors were just like the mini computers that I used to design well I didn't know that there was a computer being sold for maybe $400 that might equate to like 800,000 of today's dollars but there was some little tiny computer 256 bytes of memory it was basically what I built for my cream-soda computer but it was now being sold at affordable prices and there were a bunch of people that wanted to buy it you know they didn't have them very much money yet because all the people at the homebrew Computer Club throughout its entire existence were just low level technical sorts that don't have any spare money it takes you a year to save a thousand dollars and I don't know it was it was a real real experience for me to discover that so many people knew about this computer and they're talking about floppy disks coming out for and some people had visited the factory and they saw it being manufactured and these software basic was taken off like hotcakes with all these games game programs he could play games on it and every time for any company but had computers if you went to the company's open house they'd set up their computers in a row playing games it was like a typical way to show off a computer and now you could have your own it was like things that only belong to companies before were coming real for people Revolution thought the word revolution every meeting every two weeks we had a meeting at SLAC Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the word revolution was spoken frequently by us and that's all I ever thought that they weren't this is a revolution occurring it was real obvious these computers were so inexpensive for what they did so popular among technical people that they were going to just just sell like hotcakes to at least any one technical and they did have a place in virtually every home and the rest of the world was denying it a lot of the world didn't see this happening the large companies you know that have ways to research the computer market means they can research the people buying $20,000 $50,000 computers they had no way to to find out from those people if they wanted $1000 computer because it was dentists and lawyers and students that were going to buy the thousand-dollar computers for us in the homebrew Computer Club in 1975 we were all technicians programmers we could kind of write a program for a computer for our company but we had to give it to them to run on their computer we were denied access to the computer in a lot of ways and yet this was the thing we had grown up to love when I was in in high school I told my father that someday back then the mini computer with 4k of RAM cost as much as a house I told my father I've decided that someday I'm gonna have an apartment instead of a house and I'm gonna buy myself a computer I'm gonna be the one person that owns a computer in the world and a lot of us had really made that decision we wanted a computer but our company owned it we would sneak time there was one friend that went to the homebrew Computer Club with me and in earlier years when we were both at a local Community College he had a key and he we'd use the key and we'd go in at midnight and we'd sit there for two hours running programs with cards on this IBM computer and then sneak back out you just wanted as much access as you could get to the computer because that's how you could learn more and we all wanted our own computers and finally we were going to be able to have our computer and it wasn't our company's computer and we were going to be able to use that tool with so much of our free time we'd be able to do more than their programmers could anyway mm-hmm my kids need picking up from school why were so many people so interested I wouldn't say so many people were so interested in the days of the first homebrew meeting there were only 40 of us that met in a garage God knows why the thing that spurred it was a cover cover article on popular electronics magazine that showed a picture the Altair computer kind of the first computer you could buy it wasn't really a computer it was a kit meaning you had to be electronic and there were only 40 of us but the club even for that type of club technical people we see our own are only the only thing we had in common was we were all had to be a little bit strange we were all interested in technology or something pertaining to strange types of people strange things going on the world strange diet strange clothing strange ways of doing things you know there were probably very few people in there that had a credit card I don't so it was unusual for that that those type of people to grow over a year to maybe 500 of us meeting every two weeks but it's like we were all there just listening to every word a lot of us were very shy like myself afraid to I never raised my hand and offered something to the club occasionally I'd submit an article of a clever program I'd written or something to the club Journal because we wanted to pass around good things and I would haul down my TV set from home and hook it up and show off the computer every two weeks even the Apple to showing it off while it was being developed you never heard of a successful product being treated that way by a company because they'd be afraid well other people seeing it is gonna stop us from being able to sell it well here's a case where it obviously didn't and a lot of people would look at it not quite be sure that we were gonna go anywhere even without the Apple to that boy I don't know those is just hard anyone who was a part of the homebrew Computer Club it just it's a sort of thing that existed once in your life and may never exist again because it was that was the big excitement we were hearing what companies will come out with what products some people were offering to sell RAM chips at a certain low price or I'm talking about a new product they were working on or some the company was going to introduce I mean some of it was flaky rumors and some of it was good rumors but you love to hear it there was no business yet there was no business so there really wasn't the idea that anything you came up with it was more or less try to offer to somebody else you know if you bought it for a buck sell it for a buck just everybody's helping each other with technology and there wasn't an idea that somehow it's gonna turn into a bunch of businesses although a lot of companies sprung out of our club copyright issue really hadn't been hit very much but one of the things was you could buy the computer the alter computer for I think 400 or 600 dollars back then but he had to pay another $600 to buy the basic language on paper tape and we had a copy in our club library and anyone who wanted could borrow it even though only about 10 of us had computers after a year they could borrow the tape and run it but then somebody brought it back with a couple extra copies I think it was my friend Dan Sokol brought it back with a couple extra copies and said anybody can take the tapes but if you do please bring back more than you took and it brought a stern letter from Microsoft or whoever from MIT's themselves the company making the computer but it turned into Microsoft Bill Gates was the the author of that language and he's the one who founded Microsoft they came out with a stern letter you know they got upset about copying it you know don't copy this they just started realizing that people were copying it instead of buying it it was in keeping with the homebrew but there was also no fixed idea to even know that you were copying something you shouldn't be and to this day I think it's to see people who are out there having an adventure and cracking something just to crack it and have a copy for themselves that works but they don't really need it or use it they wouldn't bought it I love that there they their minds are developing they're learning just like we did I kind of see the world the way I was but what I see some people copy a program and then use it like a word processor an important great word processor instead of paying a few hundred dollars and I see it all over the place and it bothers me a lot to see that sort of thing sort of people that don't place the idea that if you really are going to use it then you should pay for it and I just sort of at one time thought that all technical freaks are very ethical like myself and just would never think of you know something equivalent to stealing from another but even technical people do that the sense of revolutionary was partly less than them but I think it was a minor amount we saw it as a technological revolution where a new technology was going to change the world change our lives allow things to be done by individuals had never been done before allow young school kids to find themselves the big the people who control things because of their money they control computers were no longer going to be in power in the computer world those who were smart and loved computers and wanted to do make good products were going to be in a sense in more power that was the revolution way we saw it the us them was only in the sense of we were kind of turning the tides not so much on the large computer manufacturers but the large companies who own computers at the companies that we worked for and that owned computers but had restricted us from them kept us from having good access to them and to a lesser extent us versus us versus them [Music] yeah we kind of saw ourselves doing a better job but the large companies that made computers like hewlett-packard we're predicting that these small computers they're nothing it's a little hobbyist fad they're gonna be dinky kits sold in surplus stores there's no there's really nothing to this it's like they were saying one story and we were out there saying this is the greatest product ever we're gonna you're gonna improve homes you could be able to calculations are gonna be able to play games and it's here now and it's affordable and everybody can have one and we thought it was the greatest thing ever and we could see it we could see what they could do in these other companies didn't didn't even talk the other marketing people in their business people they didn't talk the same language we did they talked proper business language but you know they they had marketing terms for why the market wasn't gonna be very large and involved but they didn't they were not the users you could tell they didn't realize what this thing was you know this was a computer in the home they just talked about it like the market size and such a share and listen man oh man so it was kind of we were we always made fun of that that they you know we'd always open up one of the magazines and someone would read a story about such-and-such a company doesn't think it's a very big marketplace and we'd all laugh 1975 the homebrew Computer Club even 76 those were those were the two big years and for me they were Pickers designed the Apple one and 75 the Apple two in 76 you know both products were had their official introduction it was me holding up a board in front of a club pointing out the chips the fact that there were it was sort of a revolutionary product I mean the feedback was motivational in other words when you saw a lot of other people that thought the same way you did you found out that you know there even though you were a bit strange there were a lot of other strange people that loved electronics and things that was motivating it made you feel that what you were doing had value it had value at least to these groups you could do something and show it off and that gave you another sense that what you were doing had value you had a lot of freedom in those days it wasn't like there were a couple of brands you can make a choice their standard word processor to buy nothing was kind of there was no structure it was unstructured we used to every meeting it was very very important that leaf felsenstein our leader announced this is the homebrew Computer Club which does not officially exist and everyone applauded for some reason it was a group of people that were glad that they didn't exist formally very much against structure and that that also was motivational it lets you be very autonomous let you do kind of what you wanted to do there were a lot of choices and nobody to push you and telling you you were making a wrong choice what processor you chose whether you were going to build your own computer or buy one of the kits what magazines you know you bought what your interests were it was all different it was scrambled it was only in later days there were a few companies out of it that turned out to be minor competitors but pretty much not so for example processor technology made some computers and I'm trying to think there were a couple other companies that made boards that would plug into that computer among others if there was any competitiveness in 1976 several of the companies making this first small computers banded together kind of against the first computer company myths they banded together and said MIT's MIT's have come out with this great computer the Altair 8800 they had the Altair bus and one of the first things these other companies decided to do was to not give this bus a name that's named after a company's product but to neutralize it and call it the s100 bus and oddly enough that's very that's sort of a political thing and not thus the thing that technical people do very often technical people generally you know are upset when you know kind of somebody's name gets removed from something I what do we have we used to have Washington's birthday and now it's Presidents Day you used to have Easter vacation and now it's spring break it's like these names kind of get pulled away for some political reason to try to try to hide them and we're the sort of people that are against that so I never understood so they have the same computer bus but instead of : at the alter bus it got changed to s 100 but it was to give the other companies a bit of a more of a presence over alter to make it do you think that alter wasn't the only company around yeah well I think judging most of the people in homebrew were not what I'd call top designers the sort of people that do excellent excellent work they were not maybe the the brightest you know top students I was born I was rare in that sense I had taught myself to be a very good designer I worked for Hewlett Packard top company designing calculators most of the people at the club were like the other people designing computers that were coming out in those days all the computers that came out were kids okay that speaks of this hobbyist surplus parts capacitors and resistors and a couple of big big inductors you know this kind of world that people live in some very strange stores not even the normal electronic stores and their designs showed it you'd look at their design it would be way too many parts way too many components too many chips for what they did they would use the the lousy lower state of RAM chip of memory chip just simply because it was the one hobbyist were used to it was available on the surplus market it was you know in stores and I was just by looking at their designs I was not impressed technically with the other people designing computers most of the people in the club that I got to know I had a similar opinion of that they were not at the top technically they just motivations we were alike and so I was part maybe one of the rare ones where I always designed to try to do the most excellent job I was I sort of knew that in certain kinds of designs I was better than anyone else that I'd ever encountered and I would come to the club and pull out a Ford that had maybe 1/3 as many chips as another computer maybe a fifth as many that did the same thing and I'd showed this one simple little board doing what five boards over there did and even more and just amazing people you mean you can sit down and just type on this one little board you can type on our keyboard and see it on a TV set and over there you have to have this huge apparatus that costs a fortune with a ton of boards and you have to have a special monitor not a TV set and you don't even have a keyboard to type yet you have to toggle some switches and push buttons and so I was a little bit my stuff was probably kind of impressive but I wasn't expressive enough to even explain to most of the people what this one had the others didn't have why it was a better direction I just chose that I liked computers for a couple things writing some programs to help me heal a Packard and my job and playing games and I designed the computer very specifically to have some good features for that but it wasn't like the other computers they were just to be like normal computers that you'd buy the normal computers that people were used to using at their own places of employment the same style of computer that had been shipped by manufacturers for ten years the sorts of things those computers did were not play games they didn't have color they didn't have graphics they didn't have paddles they didn't come with a keyboard built-in they didn't attach to your home TV they didn't have all these real nice simple ideas but I was lucky I was only building the computer for myself that was one of the neat things and the club was a place you could show it off there were if you designed a product just for yourself it might be a great product but it's hard to get it show it to a marketplace hard to show it to anyone necessarily at this club it was just a place where it doesn't matter what you have you have anything at all that's interesting there's some people here some technical people that would love to look at it and give you some good comments and say neat and I had a group that gathered around me at every meeting as I designed the computers Espinosa Wigington but there were really about 10 many that I don't even know to this day I just you know forgot which ones they were but there was a group and some of them were very quiet and they'd all sit around me in the back of the hall and then during after when we took the second part of our meeting and went out and I would have my demos on display they would all hang around me asking a few questions but they were interested in building a computer the cheapest possible and here I had a whole computer very few parts schematics didn't have to buy you had to buy a couple things for it like a keyboard and a microprocessor but they were the that was the cheapest you could do well the chip choice was very important the first chip that came out was maybe the gut this kind of interest was maybe the 8008 but around the time our homebrew Computer Club started the 8080 had come out it was the hot microprocessor it was the one that was in almost all these kits but to me and to our the other technical people a hot processor means the one that performs the best that does the most the fastest that's the easiest to use that has more instructions than the other that's the hot processor and the 6502 was the most recent one that had been introduced that's the one I chose I chose it only because instead of paying $400 to some distributor that wants me to act like I'm a company I went over to went to a show in San Francisco called West con and with a bunch of my friends paid $20 over the counter and got this chip you know it's like a $400 product is being sold for $20 to people like you can go down to a store and buy it we'd never heard of this sort of thing for a microprocessor and her processor is a computer well I bought it because it was cheap but it was the newest one and I opened up the instruction book and it had so many features in it hands down hands down I claimed it was the hot one in terms of performance you're talking about other people's view of Apple after it started I'm talking even long before Apple started were just if the club there's some technical people I'm showing off the neatest computer I happen to choose this chip it was very well accepted chip by everyone accepted every processor that was out was accepted by everyone in the club the one that most people chose to buy you know maybe 80 to 90% of the club even in the days when I was designing my Apple one before we had a company maybe 90% of the people were on the Intel 8080 side of things and I had this MOS technology 6502 chip and but I got a group that gathered around me and it was maybe 20 strong that became 6502 enthusiasts either because that's the chip they had bought or because they planned to build the computer that I was showing off they plan to buy that computer somehow when we started the company I think it was real easy for a company building a product on the old standard chip to look at anybody using a new chip and one of the things you'd say is they're not even using the hot processor that there's a lot of software out that uses it for example you could buy if you bought one of the many computers using that other chip the Intel chip you could buy basic language you could buy a lot of games you could there were a lot of things that were coming out from various companies that you could add on to your computer if you bought a new computer like the apple with the 6502 you got a couple programs from Apple that came with it you got some help from Apple but it was kind of start writing your own and it wasn't for till about a year after the Apple 2 was out that lot of games good games using color graphics on a TV screen sort of set the tone for where games we're gonna go in our life video games small little color pictures moving on a screen combined with sounds it had never been never happened before nobody could have predicted it we did not predict it we didn't build those features in I didn't build those features in thing people were gonna write these kind of games that now every Nintendo game you buy is along that style of colored grass colored characters moving around on a screen and colored pictures and all no I just sort of threw it in because well it's color its graphics I don't know where it goes I don't know what people use it for I even argued briefly that maybe we ought to leave it out and save three chips and Steve fought you know no let's put it in and we got it it wasn't till the game showed up that we knew what people were gonna do with it well it was around that time after that first year and all of a sudden the Apple had all these great games and the other machines didn't because we had a better processor a hotter one in technical terms it was easier well we really had a hotter computer our computer for a very low price could do with a lot of neat things and that invited the software to come the programs that did all these things and once we had the programs behind us there was no comparison I was never that close to time sharing to really speak very much about it my experiences were that large companies like General Electric came around to our high school and showed how we could have terminals but our school did some calculations I think just the phone bill alone to connect to it was bothersome it was too expensive I even wrote a when I was in high school I wrote a after a GE demonstration of their machine I was only one a good program I sat down wrote a couple little programs that did something I wrote a letter to the head of our math department why we should have computers why they would help people learn important things but school wasn't into that in 1968 I also was there was a local company called call computer and for a lower price you could call they had a cheaper computer for a fairly low price if you had a terminal you could phone them up and connect for just a few bucks an hour you could type away and run some programs and it was kind of kind of popular among the hobbyists it was even a place where we had a low price account that was given to the club so that every Tuesday night I think club members could come on at a reduced price and chat with each through a program called chap they could send messages to one another I eyes used to send the city I wrote a program of my own that would sit there and wait until this file called chaddock's freed up since it freed up I dumped 14 pages worth of Pollock jokes into it and everybody came back to the club meeting complaining that every two when they did this chat program it just dumped 14 pages of polish jokes on them and Randi Wigington was a friend of mine that was supposed to maintain it for the club and they always chastised him for why is this happening all these things that were going wrong with it and nobody knew it was me time sharing yes but time sharing time sharing it was interesting because that's what got me a little bit into computers I saw a friend of mine John Draper sitting in a terminal talking to computers out in Boston playing chess but it just wasn't close and quick it wasn't fast kind of tight you'd always type something and wait and wait and wait and Here Come a slow little answer it would type it out on a typewriter and then you type in the next dancer it was text only had a lot of the time sharing systems they weren't real real quick real personal colorful they weren't so much fun they could do and they were expensive they were expensive you could pay as much on a time sharing system I mean let's say let's say you had a job at work to do when you went and wrote a bunch of programs you could easily spend a few hundred dollars easily if you wanted to I could not afford to use when the 6502 microprocessor came out and I bought it I wanted to write the basic language that's a that's a many man month job maybe up to a man years worth of work to write this kind of a program and I'm supposed to rent time on a time sharing system to write the code called computer language machine language just write the code and have the computer assemble it and give me back the codes that'll run on my processor you're supposed to run it on a time-sharing machine it would have cost me thousands of dollars to have done that so I couldn't use it what's called an assembler I couldn't use the assembler on a time-sharing system I couldn't afford to I had to figure out a way to do it myself and the way I did it was I looked at conversion cards and I figured out all the codes myself I had the entire basic his handwritten was it's rare to find a program that wasn't somehow entered into a computer to calculate I did it all myself on paper and wrote down the codes and I still got my handwritten copy but that was the biggest problem of time sharing none of us had money a company coming up with a product some test equipment for engineers had enough money to put into that product because you had to to to write some programs on a computer to help develop it we didn't once we had our own computer we had computing free forever just the cost of electricity as a person that was probably the only club I'd ever really belonged to in my life and attended except for highschool clubs you know math club science clubs that sort of thing I didn't think you know once and once you get to a certain age you're still if you're technically you're always a bit young you're playing pranks you're doing a lot of jokes but you kind of think the grown-up world is just more of a world of reading the financial reports or newspapers and going to work every day and you're out of the younger life clubs kind of go with a younger life and it was a club like ham radio clubs are so it was a place to belong and find other people that had similar interests that would sit down and talk with you I had people that you know I was very shy but I ran into a few people and I invited them over to my apartment in Cupertino just filled with wires and junk on the floor you know the typical techie place a technical nerd I was but I could talk to them about something which is what I was doing what computers should be how my computer was different and these are about the only sort of people I could have socialized with in my life so I was lucky to have a good regular place to encounter a lot of them as I think I've said before the homebrew Computer Club was the most important event of my life I lived for it every spare minute of every day up light till 2:00 3:00 4:00 in the morning had asthma for a while and couldn't sleep and I had to force myself to stay awake I wrote programs I was always trying my skip my life was scheduled around getting a certain number of programs perfect as perfect this could be by Wednesday night for the homebrew Computer Club meeting because I could pass them around to a few people we had a part of the meaning you could just pass them out to anyone who wanted I mean everybody would take something that was given I tried to get the next stage of my computer always done by the meeting and I don't think I ever missed once one of my goals for what I'd have done by the next meeting but boy it just drove my life gave it a reason to have a schedule but that's because it was the most important thing happening in the world it was it was like a revolution that I'd never seen like you read about technological revolutions the Industrial Revolution and here was one of those sort of things happening and I was a part of it well for me I knew I had a good I had a good sense of myself as a designer and I happened to be designing this kind of thing for myself I was going to design it anyway but the club kind of stood for people who were talking a lot there was a lot of talk about if you have some good ideas you should share them tell other people how to do it that way the world gets more the world gets more technological good lead was kind of one of the leaders but there were many in the club that spoke this way and felt this way that we should somehow be good on a social level and you don't hear this thing in normal business you don't hear this kind of talk people talking about ethically and morally how we should be and what's good and what's bad and and that I don't know that just it just I don't know I don't know where I don't know what question I was answering wants to write the basic language without a computer normally you have a computer and then you write a program I did the opposite I had a processor but I wrote the program and I simulated it on another computer got it working and then I said well now I've got this program called basic language it's gonna be real popular and I've worked for three months to get this thing done in a breakneck pace it was a now November in 1975 I said I need a computer so I sat down and I had to design the computer and build it and it only took a couple weeks and I had the computer all up and running and built and that was back in the days when it was I had to write 256 bytes of a program that came with the computer built into it that was a lot a lot of memory in those days to build into a computer you know it's lucky I worked at Hewlett Packard where we had chips that could do that when did you first meet Steve Jobs it's hard to go back a lot of years from remember exactly what year it was but my recollection is that we were introduced by Bill Fernandez while working on the homebrew the cream soda computer in brown 1970 I was a little bit out of high school Steve was still in high school his recollection is we were introduced earlier but bill bill figured we both were interested in electronics and we both like to pull pranks and he thought you know you really like to meet this guy and we met each other and hit it off and we talked about pranks we'd done and electronic circuits and the like and got along great for quite a few years yeah the Apple one I was going to the homebrew Computer Club and Steve was kind of interested and following a little but he really didn't have the interest to go and really do these things and but he had sold surplus parts for a local surplus company and he kind of knew the world of buying something and selling it for more and he was very into like Eastern religions and meditation walking around bare feet and sandals that kind of you know almost sort of a hippie type personality eating figs all day long and but he also those kind of people very often that one wanted to make money wherever you can find a place to make some money and have a business of your own now I started I came back from all the computer club meetings and I would tell Steve what they were talking about and they might have a disc someday a floppy disc on these things and his first reaction was maybe it could do time sharing and replace the time sharing company and he started coming up with ideas right away how this thing could be turned into product how it could be marketed and he knew that I was a great designer and so he kind of stayed on top of it largely through me he attended some meetings also well I designed the Apple one computer didn't have a name yet just to show it off at the club pass out schematics I would go over to people's houses and help them build these things and Steve saw the interest he saw that there were a lot of people that were interested in getting schematics building their own somehow but he also he came to me and said well it takes a long time to wire it together to solder wires onto all the chips and interconnect them it takes a long time people there are people that don't want to spend that much time if we make a PC board then all they have to do is plug in the chips solder them one time quickly and everything's done and they save a ton of work and everything you know has a better chance of working and etc and so his idea was we start a company to sell boards it cost us 20 bucks to make a board we sell it for 40 and we kind of vision visions selling 50 somehow we'd get our money back I didn't think we'd sell 50 at our club because I'm thinking how many people are really into the 6502 and gonna buy a board for 40 bucks I didn't think it was gonna be 50 at our club but that's oh that's I saw a narrow part of the world Steve always saw a much grander part of the world and he had bigger ideas and he was he was the one who would be driving to move on some idea that might have potential either to be successful in a business sense or to be successful in somehow bringing this technology to people I don't think he was motivated at the same way most of us were by the sense of net worm it were freeing computers up I think his his motivation was always more in a business sense it was good if it was business good if it made a profit he he was just an interested he was young he had a lot of time and a lot of energy you need someone like that to make a product successful to get on the phone to talk people into it to show them what it has your own excitement will sometimes carry over to a person in a store who's deciding to buy a couple computers cuz he just opened a new computer store it'll carry over you'll see if you're so excited about it it must be good part of Barta you know and that really helped helped everything you need a person who's wants to hustle and wunst whose motivation is to have a successful company yeah no no even even you know well it was real easy to start making Apple one computers because we made them in the garage I was moonlighting I had a full-time job I had money to live on I had an income Steve flipped with his parents he didn't need an income we didn't make money with the Apple ones we only built maybe 150 of them the Apple 2 was our first big computer and we had to form a real company that's where the decision came to me by the the fellow who was gonna join us as a third partner and put up all the money and guide the business in the sense of he knew what kinds of people to hire how to organize the business what should be paid attention to how to speak to money people to raise more money Mike Markkula had a business experience but he told me that I had to quit eula packer it has to be a full-time Apple I said well I I see I saw hewlett-packard in my mind I was young shy scared Engineering I've got a good lifetime job you'll at Packard Security and you know I can be an engineer forever there and he said no you got it you got to leave I said well but I've designed two computers I've written the basic language I've written all these demo programs I've designed cassette interfaces and this and that and I've done all this in one year just moonlighting why don't I keep doing that no Steve you got to quit and I made the decision at first not to quit and it wasn't till a friend of mine who done some computers with me the one person ever in my high school understood computers also he worked to heal at Packard and he told me to Steve he could be an engineer start a company you can go into management and get rich I couldn't be a manager ever in my life you know I saw a corporate politics and things like that that was not my life all I was was a designer I wanted to design neat computers write neat programs but he said Steve you could be an engineer and start this company and just be an engineer your whole life and get rich and then I realized he was the first person that I realized there's another person out there that accepts that you can start a company even though you don't want to be a businessman you don't want to run a company you can have other people do that you can simply start a company and if I like and I can still design I can still do what I love doing designing good products writing good programs the thing is the company's just a way to help turn it into money and get good stuff into other people's hands so I changed my mind I felt that the response to the Apple one introduction at the homebrew club was good people may I held the board up I fielded some questions that people asked I could say it's got this much memory it's got these kind of chips and it's all on one board and it's easy it's simple it's already it's already assembled you can buy it for a good price I had good things technically I knew that the product competitively was excellent and that's all I needed to give me enough motivation to be able to speak in front of people you know it was felt like showing off I thought the response was good we only sold maybe 150 cuz Steve you know I had to get on the phone call a couple computer stores there weren't very many computer stores in the country one time our second sale he made our first sale to the bike club of Palo Alto and instead of buying $40 PC boards they wanted to buy $500 completely assembled computer boards so all of a sudden we were in business for real we had to Steve made hustled and made all the calls and got us 30 days credit it only took us 10 days to building the computers and get paid for them so he so he did that and I went down our second sale I went to a store in Southern California because I was on vacation showed them the Apple wine what it was isn't that demonstrated it got some orders out of that but it was pretty much you know one person at a time you know getting small accounts so we didn't sell very many in the period of a year and by then we had the Apple too we even saw the Apple 2 coming and part of the Apple 2 introduction was we said you can turn in your Apple 1 for a real good refund or a discount on the Apple 2 I was a feeling we did that out of just wanting to do something good for the people who had trusted our company and gone bought an Apple ones when we decided to form a partnership the first thing we had to do with formal partnership he had 45 percent I had 45 percent Ron Wayne had 10 percent because we trusted Ron to solve any disputes but once Steve started getting credit on a lot of parts and we had tens of thousands of dollars of credit Steve had no money and I had no money what if something goes wrong they were going to from Ron Wayne so he sold his 10% of Apple back to us for $800 but in we formed the partnership and go back on the question again yes okay right at this point to do this partnership we're gonna make those PC boards that cost 40 bucks each well the trouble is you have to pay somebody to lay out put tape on a board for a couple of man weeks of work you have to pay somebody several hundred dollars just to tape up the boards then you have to go down to a company's gonna make the boards for you and tell them make me fifty or make me a hundred and you have to pay them so much money per board so we needed money and I had I had a Gila packard 65 calculator which I sold for $500 the thing is we're gonna heal at Packard I knew that next month we were coming out with the HP 67 and my employee price was going to be 370 so in other words I didn't take a risk I knew I was gonna be able to get a better calculator for Less in one month anyway Steve sold his van I think he needed some other living money anyway it was just you know part of ongoing we didn't really put that much money and didn't take a big financial risk but that helped us that gave us the money to pay a guy in Scotts Valley that laid out the PC board for us we had no money in a bank account I wouldn't say struggling but my apartments made me pay cash because my rent checks had bounced a couple times you know just right down to the bottom always I had to spare money it maybe went into a couple new record albums PC 76 in Atlantic City was one of the most memorable times of my life big event to me I'd never been out of California except for a year of school in Colorado and all of a sudden because of Apple and this Apple one thing that really wasn't earning us money just a little it managed to pay for our plane tickets out to Atlantic City far on the East Coast I mean I'd never been to you know very many states in my life and I heard I was going to a new one so it was exciting to just to be traveling to be a part of something happening this was the revolution we got there and found out there were you know 30 or 40 different companies that were just like Steve and I a couple of people in blue jeans couple kids that had designed something showing it off looking for sales you know trying to start this industry no business backgrounds at all saw a lot of the products going on then we felt very very good about the Apple one because it stood up with features for price stood up very well it was an easy computer to show off you didn't feel embarrassed that you were showing something somebody else had the equivalent of so you know the booth was just a little tiny table and a little tiny square one little little table and an Apple one and a little brochure we've done little ad we've done for it not too much we got another friend to come in from New York and help demonstrate it Steve and the other friend really demonstrated cuz I sat in the hotel room the whole time I was typing away on an Apple 2 computer and I was I was working out and maybe the some of the routines that we're gonna go into the Apple to maybe some of my routines for drawing lines or adding a couple commands to the basic language I think while we were there at the show Oh even on the Apple one I added commands to the basic language to handle strings a word like Steven or a word like banana has a spelling and you have to be able to handle those kind of words in a computer language we didn't have it quite yet in the basic I've written so I added it got it all working and we we put it out and demonstrated it right there at the show I mean it was like everything you do it just that's what was being demoed I mean it wasn't the normal way that a business operates sure yes that's right beep speaking of PC 76 though it was interesting even on the plane flight going out there there were people some other local people from a few of the other companies likely himself and a couple to people from process chrome Emeco was another company that came out of our club we were all in the same plane and I think that they kind of always wondered yen ha ha at the to say what do they think they're doing what do they got you know inside III never I could have never seen somebody thinking that they probably did think that sort of thing but I knew that our computer was ahead of their seen what it could do for how much Steve was the businessman type that could sell it had the husband you know he could hustle it make people hear and understand and had the kind of excitement you also need you can have a better product you can have a better product and still not succeed in sales I sort of didn't know that then but I sure know it now for who knows what reasons I didn't but I was too young I've never been around ain't business I could never have thought that someone would have that sense the second thing is the way my life is organized it wouldn't have mattered to me I thought we were going up this was the big time in our life it's interesting to hear that others might have been talking about us like a heading for a big fall a lot of people probably could see even looking back I can see it was you know visible a lot of people have always told me that that sort of like Steve was using me a bit I designed the whole computer and and and Steve was just you know kind of hustling nothing selling sugar water or something but I knew the computer was the best it was the one I would have wanted to buy and you know and I was just a technical person I could only judge it objectively you know and and you could look at the results I mean even the processor technology Saul computer strangely enough Lee might have felt that then but the Apple one was the first computer that came out that said a computer for this low cost computer for people should be metaphor of a typewriter kind of it's got a TV screen your home TV and you type on a keyboard that's how it comes up until then the computers were square boxes with a bunch of toggle switches and LED lights and that was the idea of a computer because somehow you can attach it to an expensive teletype that clunks away and I said no just a keyboard and a color TV and that's what it should be well this it was so it looked like a terminal looked like a video terminal that was gonna be that was the standard for a computer it's interesting because after the Apple one the next computer I think was designed by Lee it was the processor technology Saul computer and it followed the same packaging style the same metaphor it had a keyboard and a video display and then the third one was the Apple two so we were having an impact even if they thought we were gonna go down for whatever reasons maybe because we didn't know the business world right maybe we didn't know what kind of computer you had to build to sell it but sometimes that helped us the Apple 2 was completely built in a sense it was the first computer with a plastic case you could just take it out of a box plug it in the wall and open up a manual you have to attach it to your TV set takes a you know a few minutes still does to this day and you can start typing away and doing something all the other computers you had to solder together bolt them and build parts in place run wires in here so it was the idea was every computer should be completely built because it doesn't cost that much to build it and there are a lot of people out there that don't want to build computers the hobbyists and the technical people can buy the kits and build their own there are a lot of people that would rather not when I was in ham radio I was a ham radio operator in sixth grade almost every ham radio set was a kid you'd buy a low cost Kippy you build it yourself and even nowadays that's really not the case for ham radio pretty much you buy them completely built and just use different pieces of equipment the Apple 2 was only important to be in a plastic case because we wanted to build a lot of them we investigated you know wood metal alternatives seemed more likely because it had to have a better appearance a better styling that was more something you think belongs in your home we were gonna sell it to thousands of homes plastic was sort of the winner for price Steve found a local company that could do a very cheap plastic case cheap Julian I mean something we could afford right almost put us out of business little too cheap but it was a good start it was the first when we got our first plastic cases back for the Apple 2 just a few days before the west coast computer fair where we were going to introduce it it was a pretty sloppy plastic process had a lot of problems and we did have to sand them paint touch them up a little bit and it boy it was but it was really when we started selling the computer and delivering it that we had problems getting those plastics made it was you know some little groschopp type operation that wasn't too reliable and well we were trying to squeak a few a day out of them we were getting real plastic normal plastic tooled elsewhere it takes months and months to do that West Coast computer fair was the best show of its kind in those days it was where we introduced the Apple 2 computer as soon as we got the the sheath that said you know here's the West Coast computer fair coming choose your space for a booth I said to Steve we should apply right now we should just send the money and make a phone call and get this prime space booth it was like the first one you see when you walk in and we had an advent projector television projectors on the big screens were almost unheard of in that day they were new and we had a local company that had one that would loan it to us for the show and we were going to show the Apple 2 running color which was unheard of we see the Apple two had about ten things none of these other small computers had so it was gonna be the star of the show this was the thing we were sure was gonna sell thousands of computers a month it was so far ahead of anything else it was just unreal just you know the world would have to be introduced to what it was its biggest advantage turned out to be probably from steve's thinking that it was pre-built it was for a less sophisticated type of person to use the we went to the show and there were all these computer companies that had the other products there was one that looked good technically if you read its ad in the magazines and i forget what it was called I had a little blurb called the Katz mu because mu is the Greek character for micro microprocessor but they showed up and they had a bunch of junk with tons of boards and tons of chips and it was not manufacturable so we knew that we had no competition to worry about for features competitively I'd sit there and we just explained to people how much it had inside what this computer could do we'd run a few demonstrations boy it had all the crowds all the interests and from that show we started selling the computer right then it just it was the it was our introduction I wouldn't say was a turning point it met our expectations met our expectations which were very hot and we were a part of the real computer world we were gonna sell a lot of these just like we figured we would and it wasn't till maybe a year later that sales started going down and for a while by the time the West Coast computer fair we had started the Apple 2 as a real corporation we hid in we were about to incorporate with Mike Mark lo was kind of running the business from a business perspective we had top lawyers for these kind of companies we had talked marketing people we had Regis McKenna's PR firm handling PR that's our appearance I mean I seem to recall we wore suits or at least dressed nicely for the show we had you know a nicely done booth with draping 's and things like that everything looked like it was professional even though we had very few employees you know maybe three real ones and three close to signing we looked like we were a real company that could go somewhere even the logo with its six color presentation stood out from the others it gave gave it a different view the others looked pretty much like the sort of thing ham radio operators would go for you know just kind of technological junk and ours was kind of almost a consumer product could interested another class of people that was real evident but even the West Coast computer Fair itself had an appearance that was just a larger more more here more of a real business than just a hobbyist get-together that the Atlantic City show had the appearance of more legitimate more legitimate is probably good word I'd like to take a break I'll just well as to so what difference you know Regis McKenna and a professional PR firm what difference today what difference did Mike Markkula make with his business image I'm probably the worst person ask because I'm the technical sort who had no knowledge of these sort of things and why they might be important but they were trying to set a tone that looked more like a well established company with lots of resources and the sorts of resources including people that we're gonna go on with future products you have to have sort of a just a certain type of representation and now I even know just four other people in the business world that might deal with you you have to have a certain look so that they know you're one of the normal legitimate businesses and not just a few kids that are going to vanish very unpredictable what are they going to do next and you know Mike brought a lot of that discipline to us and even when it came to operations matters our soon-to-be president Mike Scott who had a lot of experience in that field he brought a lot of the discipline you need to manufacture the product properly and keep things running that Steve and I might have just you know run from problems not resolve them right away whatever taking other you know less appropriate solutions out Mike Markkula started shirts ortley after the fair and he had a number of retailers approaching him to sell our computer were actually had lawyers draw properly a sales agreement you know it's kind of like the industry had never heard of this sort of thing companies were just saying you know send us a check and you get you know we'll send you the computers you send us a check and there were kind of no agreements I will do this I will do that you'll do the other so we were kind of the most legitimate of the the young companies or at least one of the most legitimate we well the competition part of it we know we had a hot product with the Apple 2 and we had no money and before we read into Mike Markkula and he decided to join us and loan us a quarter of a million dollars a lot more of today's dollars before that happened which was a very unusual way to finance a company we didn't have a business plan or anything we went out looking for venture capital we looked at selling our computer to Atari for a few hundred thousand dollars you know Steve thought we could get this kind of money and I was shocked I couldn't believe it we tried to sell it to Commodore and Chuck peddle came by our garage one day pulled out the Apple 2 I ran it through its paces which gave him a demo talked about it he was interested in it but he went back to Commodore and said no we can do a much cheaper version of a computer we'll build in a cheap display and we'll use different types of memories and it doesn't have to have slots to be expandable it doesn't need color it doesn't need paddles these are all gimmicks and he was he had a different approach in computers and it took them a while klumberg came but I came out after the Apple Radio Shack was third for the next couple of years those were the three names and personal computers meaning not a kit computer that you have to build yourself but well the computer you can take out of a box and start using pretty quickly the competition didn't really bother us because the first computers the RadioShack and Commodore so much less than the Apple in terms of features that we could price ours hi I have a very huge profit margin everyone wanted an apple the only hold back was it cost more because we priced it so high probably cost us less to build than either of the others I'm sure that we were afraid of some oncoming competition companies like hewlett-packard and I am TI that knew a little bit more about making products might come in that was Steve was particularly anxious and scared that you know if you don't run with a new product every six months you're out of it you know because that's the message you get from marketeers of consumer electronic products your whole life is that every six months are something new that makes everything else before it obsolete we didn't really have much competition in other words people deciding your retailers deciding they would rather handle the Commodore line or the RadioShack line it was easy to get shelf space in virtually every computer store in the country and they were all new they were just opening up for us now with the competition was resolved the competition between the Apple and the Commodore and RadioShack computers was resolved in a little over a year's time because what happened was the first programs needed very little memory and they ran and played games on the computers and people liked them even if they were on a little black and white text computer or if they were on the nice colorful Apple but the programs got more and more sophisticated and one major thing happened by 1978 the Pro all of a sudden good programs came out like the first spreadsheet program that could do a whole bunch of calculations up and down several columns on your TV screen at once and that was called VisiCalc but a program like that needs about 16k of memory the Apple had the ability for 48k of memory but the Radio Shack and the Commodore were both limited in their upper model to 8k only 8k only wasn't enough for a good program so all of a sudden we were the only ones that could have this good spreadsheet program VisiCalc and also we invented a floppy disk around that time but you need a bunch of memory in your computer to run a floppy disk the amount of memory the radio shack in the kilometer had wasn't enough they could not easily add a floppy disk they had to go back to the drawing boards and that costume year-and-a-half that's where Apple won okay well when you start out with a computer and one of the first things you do is well I'm a hardware designer among other things let's go out and design some peripherals some things you can add on to it for example a board that will connect it to a printer so people can print out their results that was one of the first projects a board that will connect it to a modem so it can use phone lines to access larger computers and the like there are a few other ideas you can come up with for boards that do different things that you plug in Mike Markkula had actually had a personal couple of personal projects he'd been involved with one was color math for printing color math problems on the screen and that was because he had a nine-year-old daughter and kind of want something that would you know fit her life but also he had a checkbook program he had initiated and he had Randy Whittington program it and I helped out a little and this program let you keep your checkbook but it had a couple of couple of problems one of them was our computer only handled integers it didn't handle numbers like 30 7.04 so we had to come up with schemes to handle normal dollar and cents amounts so he said we need floating-point basic it's a language a computer language that can handle numbers with decimal points the other one he said was well it took a long time to run checkbook you had to load a cassette tape into a cassette tape player loaded it run it into your Apple two and wait you'd have to wait a minute while it loaded in and go beep it's done then you'd have to load in another cassette that had all your check information and wait a minute while it read in beep it's done and now you can run the program and when you're all done with the program you've got to write both of those tapes back out a long time consuming the biggest part of this simple task of doing updating a couple checks in your checkbook was waiting for the cassette tape recorder so Mike Markkula said we we need a floppy disk because floppy disks are fast enough and I had played around with an idea for a real clever floppy disk controller I didn't know what they were even but I just knew it's like magnetic tape you have to write some signals onto a tape normal type signals that go up and down like voice and somehow you have to be able when it comes back through you have to be able to read it and figure out what was there that's all I knew about floppy disks but Steve got a couple floppy disks from Shughart and I sat down with this clever idea for building one with very few parts and I started working away and partly in the back of my head was what a neat excuse to go to Las Vegas show in Las Vegas in January 19 1970 gosh 7 or 8 1978 well I thought what a great chance to go to Las Vegas and see the bright lights in the city that's in movies if I can show something off well well Mike I can get a floppy disk ready to demo then and he said ok and boy it was like only a couple weeks left and I worked every day over Christmas vacation including Christmas New Year's Day Randy Whittington came in helped write some software for me and we got enough going I got the hardware finished this clever little circuit with only five chips did what normally 50 take and Randy wrote some programs that wrote the data onto the disk in the right order and we pulled out our scopes and we got it working we went to the show in Las Vegas and the floppy disc meant a lot because you could store several programs on one floppy disk at a reasonable cost you could say run checkbook run color math run Star Wars run what you know it was all there kind of accessible a lot of storage fast and that really boy that really that plus the the calculation program physical quit was good for small businesses to keep track of some of their account information those two alone made the Apple the sure winner in 1978 by the end of the year we were backlogged hugely yeah and we hadn't totally we'd sort of did it for other reasons but they fit they fit that product and a few others quite a few others so that was another almost serendipity Randee waking John was just out of high school really young kid I mean all the five people five key I don't think he was out of high school yet and that was January 78 we're in Las Vegas and I had been to a couple casinos like with my mother-in-law in Reno and I showed Randy kind of taught him how to gamble little play some craps and he would gamble little law stopping in casinos but we'd walk down to the Convention Center and I still didn't have the floppy disk completely working to where you could say run checkbook and it would run but I was real close and we went down there all night long programmed away program tried this fixed that tried it over and over we finally got it finished at 6:00 in the morning and then Randy said let's make a copy of the disc so we'll have a copy I said good idea you're thinking we were so tired that what we did was we copied a bad disc gone to the good one but i reaiiy finally restored it by about 8:00 in the morning and we actually showed it off and yeah it worked fine and boy it it started gaining some interest from that day and we knew we had a real product and then we sort of stopped changing the floppy disk and we started thinkin out a strategy for what type of floppy disk we I had basically Shughart built another floppy disk had about 30 chips and I just thought well more efficient I just bypassed about 20 of them you know I think we wound up only using four of their chips and so Steve Jobs went to Shugart talked them into making us a cheaper version that didn't have as much on it because they had a lot of stuff in there that you really didn't need if you if you implemented the floppy disk the way we did and the product was turned out to be rather easy to take from there into production I was so proud of my design i sat down and did the Pete I laid out the PC board myself taping little mylar strips came in every night I was in every night till you know 2:00 to 4:00 in the morning last technicians have left taped it up and oh I just it had to be so pure and have very few holes in the board and then I figure out a way I could make it one less hole so I scrapped everything and redid it for another week and very very seldom do you find the engineer normally an engineer doesn't get the chance to lay out his own board you give it to somebody else who's paid less money and they lay out the PC board but one of the neat that happens when you cross disciplines when you do the design but you also lay out the PC board is you can spot that the PC board layout would be a little bit cleaner if I change the design see normally the guy was laying out a PC board can't dare change the design you know it's not in his his authority his mandate he's not allowed to do that so that was kind of kind of interesting and it was neat and a few people over the years noticed how very very tiny and tight that board was I did I would start the company he he didn't say it but it's easy to figure out that he was gonna have 26 percent now and Steve 26 so the two of them together would control control all decisions they didn't quite trust me from that point on in the same way yes yes but the two of them oh yes yes but the two of them were always working on the business I was just like the technical technician who might get in the way with my you know technical or whatever who unpredicted more less predictable reasons Mike Markkula there's no question he's the one who made the company he doesn't get the credit because Steve and I are the young kids who came from nowhere just scrambling around building computers showing them off becoming successful it's the story that's easier to tell and easier to sell Mike Markkula had a business background he'd made a million dollars on a stock option at Intel already so you know he was sort of successful already in his own right and he's a stable you know business type person but it's real clear that every step of the way he knew how large we could get he knew what steps we had to take to get there he spent a lot of time reading business magazines financial magazines you know he even told me in the early days his thing was making money and this was how he planned to do it and we have large we were gonna become almost everything he predicted came came about you know with some of my business experience now I can look back and see where he was coming from he was right on target but we didn't know this Steve had no business background he did you die you know we just thought if you have a neat product you can sell it he was like looking around for competition looking for any so a bunch of people in jeans and and do you remember that conversation very very very vaguely that that sounds like Mike Merkel I certainly would have been happy to see that everyone else was in jeans he did come to me at one point though at the end of the show and he said you know we're gonna make it this thing's really gonna go but I my impression was that he was coming from the point of view of there were so many people in there with that kind of interest that was why we were gonna make it possibly it was that we were businesslike and the others were hackers and our hobbyists and you know technical nerds maybe that was what he really meant I was self-taught as a circuit designer I was I just looked at manuals of chips and started teaching myself but I always made it a rule like a game to try to get to fewer parts is better and I would I excelled at that I was very good at all every doesn't thing I ever designed all sorts of hobby projects projects I designed for other companies moonlighting things I designed for hila Packard the Apple computers very proud that my design was much fewer parts than all these other little companies coming out and I don't know it just makes you feel that you've done something with yourself that's so valuable it's motivating it gives you a lot of energy it makes you want to show it to people talk about it go on and design the next thing you just don't like run out of energy like minutes just did the thing I'm doing you know just a job no no it's your whole life is is on display you know all my circuits you know of even things besides apples stuff though I always felt that way about and it was like an art I found out later on when we started Apple that there's only about one out of every 10 engineers that is really that superb that just chases perfection to the nth degree and those are the few that are like artists and I was I was just one of that type I just work and work and work for an extra you know five hours in one night to save the tiniest little bit of code in a program figure out a way to get past it it seemed like you were getting closer to pure perfection closer to what God had intended if something just sort of worked out with almost no parts it was somehow the way nature meant the world to turn out user groups took on a more formal structure during the years that Apple was growing they started out like the homebrew club kind of lose just a few people technical interests they had computers they you know start buying computers they find they started growing in size getting more organized to have separate interest groups and how they would run their meetings and presentations of affairs going on you know presentations of new products and I'd say that was very very important to Apple because Apple was kind of this new thing that people didn't know what it was yet today it's easy to know what a computer is to buy tons of software and programs that tell you what it is and how to use it back in those days you didn't have that kind of communication tool got a new product and you want to talk to people about it you want to find out how to solve some problems you're having go to a meeting ask other people or other people will show you you can also pick up new products at the meetings also once the game started coming out in 1978 on tape in 1979 on disk boy that was the place to collect games and copy them even if they were copy protected find out ways to crack them and pass them around at the clubs so the user groups user groups really were like a big promotion largely for the company they tended to orient around a computer on Apple users group unlike the homebrew Computer Club which was just computers themselves as a technology the club started being Commodore clubs or Apple clubs you know for one brand a computer just worked out better that way well when we first started Mike Markkula said there well about once every 10 years some product starts out at zero that never existed before and it grows to a few billion dollar market in a few years just well maybe only once a decade and that's the only time a new startup company that didn't exist before brand-new just new people can come out with something good get a hold of that market and maintain their market position as the market grows and matures and become a 500 billion million dollar company in just a few years that was what he predicted for us in the back of my head I said well the more successful a marketing person you are and Mike said mark Lowe was successful already the more say the more successful you are the bigger a number you throw out you know one guy will say you can be a 10 million dollar company because you know he's acting like he knows what a 10 million dollar company is and he's big and Mike Markkula was just the best so he was using the biggest number of all and I really you know didn't have any feeling for what that meant or if it was possible and it was really quite a bit later 1979 sometime maybe close to when we were going public and I was in at Apple and Steve kind of grabbed me he said you know we made more money than our parents you know in their whole lifetime and maybe he and I were each worth a few million dollars by then and it just sort of right then I just sort of realized that I'd never thought about it till then it was kind of stunning and then it just kept going up things kept increasing for us I was starting to lose bit interest the company was becoming a little more more structured you know maybe maybe fifty to a hundred technical people and lab manager and section managers you know I mean it was kind of you know structured and what my need wasn't what it had always been which was I was the key person to get certain certain types of computer peripherals done or write a piece of code or fix this or answer the phone for somebody there were jobs that I I alone could do in the early days and all of a sudden now we had a lot of bright people and you could assign a job to this person that person there were 50 jobs going on I couldn't do them all myself anyway and I just didn't this was the company that started and it was harder for me to just sort of sit back and do one simple task at a time I could do anything I wanted but it felt different it was a little bit of a depression and now we were hot on the Apple 3 and the Apple 3 had very little interest for me I'm not business oriented I didn't need a business computer which it was I love the Apple 2 the game machine plus I had the most to contribute to the Apple 2 because I was so familiar with it knew how to design new things for it answer questions for other people in the company and we went but we went public on the strength of the app the Apple 2 sales plus the Apple 3 as an upcoming product that was gonna sell to business I did hit me but it had hit me slightly before the you know the going public and then the stock was really liquid in other words what it was worth you could sell it even before being public there were private investors and there was just a procedure for doing it we just went public because the timing was sort of right you know just public image of Apple how much press we'd be been getting we had a new product coming out it was the best time to go public and we were going to be forced to go public anyway eventually just due to the number of shareholders was increasing as employee stock options got fulfilled I was secretary of the company back then and I signed every stock certificate and I saw how fast people were given them away as gifts and people were employees were getting them and I knew that the number of shareholders was going up and up and up and I knew that was gonna sort of make it logical to go public eventually so we went public a little sooner than Mike Market was predicting no no no it'll be another couple years and his secretary the corporation I saw these stock certificates and I thought it had things gonna be sooner than that and it was the Oise planner that was really interesting because I had you know I had a private investor that was willing to buy a certain amount of stock for me and I could get a couple million dollars and be really you know secure for a long time and have a nicer house and I was ready to do that and I thought well if I'm gonna sell it to some outside investor in this company looks like the hot thing going why don't I sell it to the inside people are helping make the company you know and don't really you know have stocks so I sold it to engineers and marketing people at Apple limited the number of shares they could each so something I couldn't try to get rich yeah the wasp Lance old stock in the company to about 80 people just took up a list you could have 2,000 shares each and it was a price that was you know deliberately you know it was low it's what an investor would have been happy to give me then but I'd rather do it to insiders and many many of more fears are very fulfilling that they wrote me and said it would Nabal them to buy a house was the usual response and I always felt good about that no one's ever done anything like that I was very strange our lawyers were little scared about letting that one even happen I think that's that sort of how it was explained to me but sometimes it's explained that they don't necessarily force you but it can they can lead you to file so many reports that you might as well go public anyway also there was something besides the Oise plan which is that were identified I think five people who had been employees in an earlier date and had not received stock and their presence maybe they weren't an important job in the company but Bill Fernandez hadn't been there wiring stuff up joking with me chatting with me I wouldn't have felt good about what I was doing he was a part of this little startup when we were 8 people and there were about five people identified in that category that just hadn't been compensated and they were such a key part to what had happened and each of them I think I gave them a large amount of stock you know later on proved important in their lives but they deserved it that you know my opinion mike marklar might disagree in business business ethics sense know what they do is not important it can just be purchased you know it's not some rare element but I don't know it's like if I deserve to be this successful financially then so did they they were a part of it it's I think it's a tool there are certain things that we did before we kept certain accounts balance did certain calculations to see how a business would go or how our checkbook was going or we kept lists of the records we owned get mailing lists and those things did it by pencil and paper this was just a more efficient tool for a lot less effort you could get these things done it helped it really helped usher in the day of computer games or tailed television video games in the home in your home it it just set a tone that there's there's a new kind of product that can help some people with the things that they can do at home you know or now it's really some even a small business tool it's just less expensive it allowed us to do a lot more or less expensive for example when I designed the apples we had one computer in my lab a Hewlett Packard one computer it was a mini computer definitely about as powerful as the Apple 2 when we first introduced it and yet it was shared by maybe 80 engineers what those who needed it would go and run a program on it and that we'd take turns all day long using that computer well now you walk into an engineering lab and almost everybody has a computer on their desk and they just sorted and the total cost for the entire lab is just as cheap and yet they've got better computers it's like the price to performance it's a rare thing that somehow the price for the same machine the prices dropped like a hundred times just in the last 10 20 years it's some very few things drop in price you know it's really amazing it all boils down to how they make chips to tell that story pretty clear how did it change the field of computing well you know now you had a very I think it I think it increased the performance level what was demanded of a program to be a very good program it just raised raised the level that a program had to perform it maybe because there were so many more people who wrote a program now it could go to a million people easily if it were very good and very general and boy it was worth putting in all sorts of fine finished touches making things very understandable very forgiving if you make a mistake it has to be kind of gentle with you and you know not rude and it has to give you ways to escape out and give you options to try something else suggest what you might have done these sort of concepts they were they were kind of well-known among some people but they weren't it wasn't there weren't resources enough to put them into programs that were just going to be used by computer people in a computer company who will always be expected to do the right thing so the programs had to become more personal you know have some color attached to them and this was just a greater demand on the part of the consumers the sort of people buying computers were not technical anymore yeah in computers there was back in the days when you we see pictures of computers that filled up rooms obviously to build huge huge machinery that took filled up rooms it took dozens and dozens of people working on a key computer project for a company like UNIVAC or IBM and then all of a sudden in 1975 and six we had this little window where a significant computer could be designed by one person and it could become a huge successful computer product and now here we are again where companies like Apple and other an IBM you don't have to put dozens of man years into designing the next computer and planning how to market it it's like now we've got enough to it's a complicated world where one individual can rarely make a difference anymore why are we talking to you well you're talking to me instead of some of the others designing computers at that time because Apple as a company was so successful that it hung on Apple sold a lot of computers kept managing to supply it my role was I designed a very very good computer with a lot of new features I thought them out and turned out but if it had turned out a failure you probably wouldn't be talking to me if we'd gone under and some other company's product had been more desirable Commodore you probably talking to Chuck peddle I think Apple was successful because it appealed directly to a less sophisticated user not a computer technician but somebody who could make use out of the computer sort of person who was smart enough to use a pencil and paper and figure out some notes or wanted to make drawings or wanted to play games but a less sophisticated person technically we approached them our advertising said Apple the name Apple kind of suggests something that fits in your home that anyone can understand it's not a technical metamorphose of you know words we appeal to that sort of person we tried to supply them easy solutions that were understanding and they existed turned out that that was a big market that had been unseen in prior years they existed they bought a lot of our computers and it made us successful you know it might be that some of those steps we could have gone a different direction and been just as successful but that's the one we went in and we were successful for example for example we could have stayed a game company forever you know and then maybe we'd only be as successful as Nintendo which is the same as Apple so it's you know we went in the business direction and we were successful but it wasn't the only option

Channel: Тарас Бережницький

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Id: E80u1Jww5Fw

Length: 103min 50sec (6230 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 18 2018